Monash University Selects Mellanox CloudX for Research Initiative

Today Mellanox announced that Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, has selected the company’s CloudX platform to provide the fabric for its new cloud data center. The cloud utilizes Mellanox end-to-end 10, 40, and 56Gb/s Ethernet solutions as part of a nationwide initiative to create an open and global cloud infrastructure. Monash selected Mellanox’s RDMA-capable Ethernet technology due to its performance scalability and cloud efficiency improvements.

The Mellanox CloudX platform enables application defined back-planning, where researchers orchestrate all the various components – cloud, HPC and software – into their own 21st century microscope within our data center,” said Steve Quenette, deputy director of the Monash eResearch Centre. “Mellanox Open Ethernet solutions give us the flexibility and the freedom to optimize the interconnect infrastructure for our needs and to ensure that we will be able to cope with the increase in data, compute and storage requirements of our users.”

Monash University’s cloud node, R@CMon, is part of The National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources (NeCTAR) Project. NeCTAR aims to enhance research collaboration by connecting researchers throughout Australia and providing them with access to a full suite of digitally-enabled data, analytic and modelling resources that is specifically relevant to their areas of research. Since the initial deployment of a high availability CloudX OpenStack cloud, the University has expanded its RDMA Ethernet fabric to exceed the innovation goals of NeCTAR. The fabric tightly integrates Ceph and Lustre storage with the cloud, meeting the needs of block, object and applications workloads as one converged fabric.

Mellanox has been a great partner from Day One, and we believe their products were the only choice for the type of unique infrastructure the University required,” said Blair Bethwaite, senior cloud architect at the Monash eResearch Centre. “The Mellanox SwitchX-2 SX1036 Open Ethernet switches provide the flexibility we need and allow us to mix and match capabilities, which is critical for our dense compute architecture. Since integrating the Mellanox solutions, we have been able to achieve greater performance than ever before. It was truly a quantum leap from our previous compute environment.”

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